Ocean of Storms

by Christopher Mari

Loss isn’t eased by another mourner.

His father had always said that the more people learn as a race, the less they seem to have understood. Thackeray Zell knew that statement not only applied to his generation but to all generations of humanity going back to antiquity, when the Greeks believed Apollo pulled the sun across the sky each day with his chariot. Yet a new piece of information had always come along to prove so many of the previous generations’ theories wrong. Newton. Galileo. Einstein. Any of those precious few who leapt beyond conventional thinking and saw the universe with new eyes. And what have we learned from the experience? Not to stand in awe of the remarkable fabric of the universe, but to pat ourselves on the back after each of our discoveries. If we were really intelligent, we’d accept the fact that we hardly know anything at all. Perhaps then we could make the really great leaps in scientific understanding, leap beyond the limits of our own life spans and experience. In order to be truly wise, we have to learn how to question things above ourselves, above time.